Everything dies. The Earth. The Sun. The Milky Way galaxy. And the universe. Especially the universe. As a new study confirms, the universe is well on its way toward its inevitable end, though we still have billions of years left.The European Southern Observatory’s Galaxy and Mass Assembly project performed a survey of 200,000 nearby galaxies, comparing them to galaxies that were more distant (and hence older, from our point of view)....
If you’re a grown human and you don’t understand how car engines, speakers, or other everyday engineering work, then you may feel like you’re past a point of no return—the point when it becomes too embarrassing to ever ask. Jacob O’Neal’s GIFs are your answer. His amazing and captivating Animagraffs are annotated animations that show the inner workings of popular mechanics.Says O’Neal: “Subject material for Animagraffs has to be able to loop indefinitely (since that’s all animated GIFs can do), and should require animation to tell the story, as opposed to adding animation as a gimmick....
Media Platforms Design TeamCar testors like us take cars to extreme places, pushing them through maneuvers that they are highly unlikely to encounter in the real world. The idea is to push the limits to get an accurate picture of a vehicle’s behavior-under controlled conditions with a professional driver at the wheel. It’s what we do whenever we slap on the test gear. During its routine testing, Consumer Reports found that the Lexus GX460 displayed a tendency to slide out the back end during extreme cornering maneuvers....
Cleanup efforts at Fukushima have a boost from halfway around the world, thanks to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.Japan’s doomed nuclear plant has a series of intricate pipes underlying its infrastructure. The struggle for cleanup workers is to determine where there might be a leak in something you can’t exactly cut into. So how do you map the series of pipework to find potential faults? You use particles. Specifically muons.As the naturally occurring particles pass through a part of Fukushima, a series of detectors map their movements and notice whether they change direction....
Come fly the friendly skies—standing up. In an effort to cram ever more people into the limited confines of a commercial airliner, at least one aircraft manufacturer has suggested getting rid of the seats altogether. Airbus has offered Asian carriers a standing-room-only option, according to The New York Times. A carrier has yet to adopt the configuration, which props economy class passengers against a padded backboards, their bodies in place with a harness—not unlike the treatment you’d get after suffering a spinal injury on Baywatch....
Media Platforms Design TeamSan Diego, Calif.—Geologists know that generous applications of pressure and heat can create diamonds from common rock. It seems a somewhat parallel process has been at work on Detroit’s automakers, and Ford Motor Company in particular. Economic pressures and competitive heat have changed Ford. While the company’s trucks have always been viewed as industrial-grade diamonds, Dearborn’s small cars struggled to separate themselves from common road gravel. When the 2011 Fiesta tumbled out of the rock polisher, though, it proved the new capabilities of Ford’s small-car team....
On-Sale Date: Fall 2014Base Price (est.): $55,195 Competitors: Porsche Cayman, Lotus EvoraPowertrains: 1.8-liter turbocharged I-4, 237 hp, 258 lb-ft, 6-speed dual-clutch automatic, RWDEPA Fuel Economy (city/hwy): 24/34 With the new 4C, Alfa has ripped away the overbuilt layers of technology and comfort that have been dumbing down the driving experience over the last decade. The result is the purest sports car since the Lotus Elise, and one that is also breathtakingly gorgeous and quick....
Media Platforms Design TeamWe saw a curious demo in an out-of-the-way corner of the Samsung booth the other day. Confusingly labeled “Optical Wired and Wireless,” it was a cobbled-together setup of fiber-optic cables, infrared transmitters, a set-top box and two flat-panel televisions—seemingly held together by duct tape. (Damn, should have gotten a photo!) I’ll explain it as best I can, considering that it was explained to me by a Korean Samsung engineer who was either confused by his own technology or the English words necessary to detail it to me....
Comet Siding Spring hails from the Oort Cloud, a spherical cloud of icy, dusty objects at the very edge of the Solar System. But this fall, it will pay a visit to our neighborhood.In October, Siding Spring will pass within just 82,000 miles of Mars; that’s a third of the distance between Earth and the Moon. Its coma of gas will fully engulf the planet for several hours during the flyby on October 19....
Media Platforms Design TeamHow do earthquakes change the Earth’s rotational speed and axis? Earthquakes can change the Earth’s rotation by rearranging the Earth’s mass. This is what a spinning ice skater does to make herself spin faster. She moves her arms closer to her bodyshe’s moving her mass closer to the axis about which she’s rotating. And earthquakes do the same thing. This earthquake must’ve moved the mass on average a bit closer to the Earth’s rotation axis to make the Earth rotate faster and the length of the day a bit smaller....
“James Cameron’s Story of Sci-Fi” airs Mondays on AMC at 10 PM Eastern. The fourth episode of this six-part series focuses on dystopias and dark futures in science fiction. Here, we take on the question of how to prevent the rise of an AI like SkyNet from Terminator 2.As long as we’ve had idea of robots, we’ve had the idea of robot uprisings. Even the term ‘robot’ originates with the Czech play R....
Media Platforms Design TeamGoogle has been growing exponentially the last year with major acquisitions in robotics and smart home computing and even acquired artificial intelligence startup DeepMind earlier this week. But one of its more massive assets in its tech menagerie is Motorola, which Google shelled out $12.5 billion for the company in 2011. After less-than-stellar sales of the Moto X and Moto G smartphones, Google is calling it quits and nearing a sale of the mobile company to Lenovo....
Media Platforms Design TeamHarley-Davidson’s air-cooled V-Twin remains a stubbornly anachronistic signature of the American motorcycle manufacturer, and its most potent expression comes in the form of the 110 cubic inch (1,803cc) Screamin’ Eagle lump currently found in the CVO lineup. Producing 122 lb-ft of torque, this is the most powerful Harley engine to date; as such, an oil cooler can only go so in protecting this puppy from soaring temps.How does Harley keep this mill from melting when mercury hits triple digits?...
Media Platforms Design TeamNortheast of Philadelphia’s city center, where the neighborhood of Kensington folds into Fishtown, there’s Hazzard Street. For years, the name seemed appropriate. After the city and then the kids abandoned a local park—known as Pop’s Playground, for a local who picked up the trash—the drug dealers moved in. Two years ago, the New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC) offered local skateboarders the opportunity to turn Pop’s into a skate park—if they did it on their own....
Media Platforms Design TeamThe scenario is terrifying: While cruising along, your car takes off like some mysterious invisible foot has floored the throttle. The odds that this will actually happen are infinitesimally small. We’d bet that the morning walk to your car has a greater likelihood of injury. But sudden unintended acceleration does happen. And if you’re driving, you should know how to remedy the situation. Step 1 /// Press the Brake Pedal, HardThe first thing to do–immediately–is press as hard as possible on the brake pedal....
Media Platforms Design TeamStardust, the comet-chasing spacecraft, has flown its last mission. With its fuel spent, the 12-year-old spacecraft got the OK from NASA on Thursday to shut down for good.The spacecraft had a fruitful dozen years. Launched in 1999, Stardust’s first mission was to capture the debris cascading off of the comet Wild 2 and bring it back to Earth. Wild 2 is a hunk of dust and ice that’s believed to be 4....
Fact: Two new robots unveiled at the 2009 Robobusiness conference in Boston are specifically designed to steal jobs from hard-working, flesh-and-blood Americans.More relevant fact: As usual, the jobs in question are the sort of thankless, dangerous and unsavory work that most humans would run screaming from.Dirty-Bomb DisposalMedia Platforms Design TeamThe robot with the dirtier, and arguably more dangerous job description is an advanced explosive ordinance disposal unit. This bot, a collaboration between Segway Robotics and SRI International, allows a remote operator to defuse a bomb with surgical precision....
Media Platforms Design TeamThis week Russia announced a strange-sounding plan to load nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles onto trains with specially-designed boxcars that could launch these ICBMs right from the track. The Russians call it the Combat Railway Missile Complex and say it will be active in 2018.The idea may sound ludicrous, but it’s strategically sound—at least in theory. Instead of keeping the ICBMs in underground silos on constant alert, Russia could roll them out during a crisis....
Increased Russian naval activity near undersea Internet cables has American military officials concerned that Russia might be preparing to sever the communications lines in case of a conflict. Russian submarines and spy ships have been observed in the North Sea, in waters near Northeast Asia, and even in locations closer to American shores such as off the coast of Cuba, The New York Times reported yesterday.The fiber optic cables are crucial for American communication with allies as well as the flow of global commerce....
The Gerlache Strait looks exactly as I imagined Antarctica would: Snow spills to the edge of the passage from the jagged landscape lining either side. The tops of icebergs rise from the flat, dark water like stiff peaks of beaten egg whites; the ice just beneath the surface glows turquoise. The air hangs soft and gray, and by the time the ARSV Laurence M. Gould rounds the southern tip of Anvers Island and enters Arthur Harbour, a light snow is falling....
